Prose and stories that, even at their darkest, are still resoundingly beautiful.
A collection delivers a series of 15 understated tales tinged with sentiment, perceptiveness, and buoyancy.
More than a few of the stories in this book revolve around World War II, shackling characters during the conflict and years later. In the opener, “Old Soldiers,” former GI John Talmadge tracks down Father Kolbe in Germany, with intimate knowledge of brother Henning’s wartime death. “The Swastika,” meanwhile, is unsettling, in which apparent neo-Nazis are harassing Vernon Benson. Seeking help, he may have picked the wrong place, a protection/security company run by Don Morandi, who secretly knows a great deal about Benson, including his real name. Stories unrelated to World War II are just as affecting, with people from various walks of life burdened by random events. The main character in “Scofield’s Dream,” for example, stays at Jack’s hospital bedside, since his friend’s serious injury stems from a car accident that Scofield caused. The affluent Sumner Wainwright III has an encumbrance of a different sort in “The Transplant.” He’ll soon need a new kidney, but the bigot doesn’t want the organ of “just any derelict off the street.” A few of the stories are noticeably short, but “The Shadows,” in particular, is a sweet, rewarding account of John and Sally and their daily shared park bench. Not surprisingly, much of the volume is somber and despondent. “The Deserter” spotlights radioman Hopkins, a coward who only knows how to run when the enemy is close, while a man’s 17-year-old son in “The Last Hunt” may be too sensitive even to witness the shooting of a deer. There are, however, occasions of cheeriness; mom Liz watching little Francie head for “The School Bus” on her first day of kindergarten is melancholic but mostly hopeful. Hilfiker (Memorial Day, 2015) sears his words onto the pages, filling them with passages that reverberate. One instance is a corporal in “First Meetings,” alone after losing his fellow soldiers: “Standing there in this quiet tomb with the last scent of acrid gun smoke still detectable, thinking that I was the lucky one and then wondering if I really was. For them it was over.”
Prose and stories that, even at their darkest, are still resoundingly beautiful.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5023-2694-2
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Elmcroft Publications
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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